Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy, Research, Capacity and Influence

ABSTRACT

Uganda continues to be prone to climate shocks especially drought which has adverse impact on food security. This paper studies household resilience capacities with special focus on how different resilience capacities mitigate the impact of drought on food security. The study follows the TANGO framework and two-step factor analysis to construct resilience capacity indexes. It employs a panel data from the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) undertaken between 2010/11 and 2018/19, spanning five waves. To minimize the bias arising from subjective self-reported drought shock, we introduce an objective measure of drought from the global SPEI database into the UNPS data. We also control for attrition bias by controlling for attrition hazard estimated from the attrition function. Our analysis reveals that households in Uganda exhibit significantly low and nearly static resilience capacities. This implies majority of households in Uganda remain highly susceptible food insecurity in the event of severe drought. The study shows that building resilience capacities is an effective way of protecting households from such devastating situation. In this regard, adaptive capacity is found to be the most effective in mitigating the effect of drought on food security. Transformative capacity and absorptive capacities possess limited mitigating power. Based on significant components from each of the capacities, we recommend investing in early warning systems and wide dissemination of climate related information to enhance preparedness adaptation, encouraging and supporting formation and sustainability of informal institutions at local levels, enhancing access to communal resources, improved infrastructure and agriculture extension services by the most vulnerable groups.